Jazz Themes

Most of the characters in Jazz struggle with unrequited love. Violet’s husband Joe Trace betrays her by beginning an affair with a much-younger woman named Dorcas; Dorcas lusts after an arrogant, disinterested man named Acton; Dorcas’ aunt Alice Manfred still longs for her husband, who has been dead for decades. Even the animals in the novel seem heartbroken—Violet’s parrot, for example, squawks “I love you” all day long, only to hear…

In the introduction to her 1992 novel Jazz, novelist Toni Morrison writes that she wanted her book to capture “the essence of the so-called Jazz Age”—what she defines as “improvisation, originality, change.” In the narrative, as married couple Joe and Violet Trace navigate life in 1920s Harlem, they are struck again and again by the prevalence of jazz music. Young people stay up late dancing to records or go out to clubs, while guitarists…

Toni Morrison’s 1992 novel Jazz is set at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, and the story’s protagonists live in the prosperous, culturally flourishing Manhattan neighborhood that gives the movement its name. Yet even as the narrative celebrates the Black music and invention that surges on Harlem streets, it also demonstrates just how deeply anti-Black violence has shaped life for central character Joe Trace, his wife Violet, and his mistress Dorcas. Both…

From the very first page of Toni Morrison’s Jazz, set in Jazz Age Harlem, the novel’s unnamed narrator is confident that she understands her neighborhood perfectly. “Sth, I know that woman,” she boasts, sequestering herself in her room as she tells readers about Violet Trace, and her husband Joe’s secretive affair with a young woman named Dorcas. As the story progresses, the narrator goes even further, imagining herself into different times…